Interaction with web sites may include actions such as entering information into forms, following links, activating buttons, etc. These actions may be performed by a person who interacts with the web site through a web browser. But the process of interacting with a web site need not be performed by a person, and could be automated by using software to interact with the site.
One example of software that may interact with a web site is a script engine. In this example, the script engine carries out instructions in a script. The script describes the operation to be performed in order to interact with the web site. The script engine may contain the basic logic to interact with web sites. For example, the engine might have the ability to issue Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request, follow links, enter information into fields, etc. The script may then identify the particular operations to be performed—e.g., the particular Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to be visited, particular links to be followed, particular values to be entered into fields, etc.
In general, scripts that drive interaction with a web site are written by humans, based on manual analysis of the web site. There are some commercial providers of scripts. However, the scripts obtained from these commercial providers are normally written and/or updated by humans. This writing is usually based on manual analysis of the web sites for which the scripts are written. Providing a script normally entails not only analyzing the web site and writing the script initially, but also maintaining and updating the script to keep up with changes to the web site. Due to the cost of using human labor to perform these tasks, it may be commercially infeasible to use human labor to write scripts for the web sites of businesses other than those that have a very large number of customers.